There are some very specific tips which apply specifically to the ecommerce websites.
The first one that I would suggest that you look into is the amount of content that you
have on your website.
You have to be mindful of a Panda update.
Ever since the update came out, Google is looking very closely at the type of content
that websites have and websites that have very thin pages with very little content on
them, they may get penalized.
Unfortunately, Google is not able to determine if you have an ecommerce website or a blog
or are using some kind of a content management system that basically creates pages with very
little content on them.
What you have to make sure is that product pages, the ones that usually have content
that looks template like, for example, you have a product page which contains description
made by the manufacturer, or you're using a product page for a specific product that
looks like it's been generated by a template.
You have to make sure to either try to add content on them.
You can use things like user generated content reviews, which is very valuable, or what you
can also do is write content yourself.
If you are in a position where you know you have hundreds or even thousands of different
product pages and you know that yourself you cannot personally add unique content to these
pages, which is going to add value and prevent you from getting penalized by Panda, it may
be a good idea at this point to basically de-index those pages from Google.
Or at least to put a no follow on them and try to concentrate all of your link building
efforts in sending all of your link juice towards the category pages, so the pages which
will list your products, and these pages only.
The second tip I would say that is very important is to have high quality images on your website.
This is an ecommerce SEO tip, but it also just doesn't work just for SEO, it also increases
the conversion rates on your website, because if someone is visiting your ecommerce site,
the pictures are smaller, pixelated, your conversion rates are going to suffer.
Why it can be good for SEO is because you can get links referrals from people taking
your picture, posting it on their website and giving you credit.
Or it may attract referrals and views from websites like Pinterest that are interested
in those high quality images.
Another very useful SEO ecommerce tip is when you're structuring, when you have your website,
make sure that whatever template you're using or whatever content management system you're
using on the back end of your ecommerce website, it creates canonical pages.
Because when you have an ecommerce website, sometimes what happens is that one page is
going to have 10 different URLs.
What that tells Google, it may tell Google, is that it's duplicate content on your page.
But in reality, it's not.
What Google came out with is a concept called "Canonical Page."
What happens is, if you have 10 different URLs which are pointing to the same page,
you can have a canonical tag which indicates to Google that all these other nine pages
are irrelevant.
They're just copies and the real canonical page, the one that should be counted is just
one URL.
Do it, because it may hurt your SEO efforts if you don't.
Do content marketing and create link bait.
It's very important, because when people look at their analytics and they look at the keywords
which bring visitors to their website, oftentimes, what they discover is that, "What is this
keyword.
I never actually targeted that specific keyword."
You're going to learn what time that a lot of visitors that you get to your website,
they're not targeting specific keywords which are anticipated, it's completely unique terms
that they're typing in.
As long as you write relevant content, which is very factual, it's rich in media, for example,
images or videos, it's going to attract relevant visitors, your target demographic to your
website.
At the same time, it's going to create link bait.
If someone sees that you wrote an excellent article in regards to your niche, they may
post it on their blog and create a link back to your website.
Another thing is things like link bait, so there's a great example by a website called
ice.com.
What they did is they actually had an app where a person can take a picture of their
finger and once they are using this app, they can see what a ring is going to look like
on their finger once they buy it.
It basically allows you to try out a ring in a virtual manner.
You'd best believe that, of course, this is going to create link bait.
It's going to create all this talk and mentions about this specific app that they have, and
it's going to create link backs back to their websites.
The fifth SEO ecommerce tip is to create content for your ecommerce website.
For example, you're selling household goods, decorative items, what you can do is have
a contest where a person is going to describe the best use for your product, for your decorative
item, in their household, and they can win $500 by participating in the contest.
The way that they participate is by leaving a comment on your page, on your contest page.
But to participate, they must do one of the two things.
They must either like and share it on Facebook, or they must tweet it.
That's going to create backlinks and views to your website.
Number six is to do personalized gift giveaways.
What you're doing is, you're targeting the people which are the most active in most of
your clients, and then you give them personalized gift giveaways.
Oftentimes, you're going to see what happens is that those people are going to take pictures
of the personalized gift that you sent them, and they're going to post it on their social
media websites like Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter.
As an example, there was a very large company that did this personalized gift giveaway and
they analyzed the customers that they have chose just the ones which are most active.
They got 100 percent of those clients that got the free gifts, they actually posted those
pictures on their social media profiles, and it got them thousands upon thousands of visitors
and page readers.
The next thing that you can do for you ecommerce website is to create deal pages, and then,
once you have a deal page, for example, for Black Friday or for some Cyber Monday, you're
going to contact coupon websites and mommy bloggers and tell them about this great deal
that you're having.
Whenever they mention your website, that's going to create a backlink back to your website,
and ultimately, is going to be good for your SEO optimization for any ecommerce website.
Another thing that you can do for your ecommerce website in terms of SEO is to spy on your
competition.
You run a link report on the website that is beating you in the search engine result
page, and you see exactly where it is, where they get their links.
Then you try to go to those same websites and also get the links.
One of the things that I've seen with a lot of websites is that whenever they're doing
the link report on their competition, they have a lot of these aha moments.
They're like, I see they're doing this, they're applying this specific technique to promote
their website, so it's going to give you great insights into how the competition is doing
so you can leverage that knowledge to then SEO optimize your ecommerce website.